We are back

First of all, let me say that I’m terribly sorry about the week-long downtime. The visitor numbers have been growing lately, putting more strain on the servers, and very suddenly something had to be done about that. At the same time, the two pieces of software running this site also needed a full update. What followed was a week-long battle with database queries, problems caused by the update, fixing those problems, and fixing problems that were caused by me fixing problems.

Everything should be back up and running now, though.

Despite the lengthy update, there aren’t many visible changes. I guess the only major one is that if you are registered to the site, you now have your own user profile page. If you are logged in, you can access people’s profile pages by clicking their names in the forums or comments sections.

To protect you privacy, only members who have been registered users for more than a week and have posted a comment to the website can view profile pages. Similarly, only those people actually have profile pages (so if you are a dedicated lurker, fear not). It is also completely up to you how much (or little) information you wish to share.

You can see an example of a profile page here. That is, if you are logged in and qualify for viewing profile pages (see above).

Apart from members’ profile pages, there are only a very few minor cosmetic changes here and there, like handy buttons with which you can post a link to this site from Twitter, Facebook or other places.

There may not be much, but at least everything should be working now, and especially the front page and the discussion front page should be much more responsive than they used to.

That is not to say that there aren’t a few remaining issues. Internet Explorer users (still) won’t be able to use the comment editor buttons to add images or links. It’s got something to do with how IE handles javascript. I’ll try to find a workaround. Opera users, meanwhile, will notice a couple of design oddities. Again, something I’ll try to deal with.

The biggest question mark is actually the new member profile system which I have used previously on other sites, but never on this scale. It should work, though. I do know that if you manage to make it throw an error, you’ll find yourself in the scary world of the website backend, instead of the website proper. There be dragons, but “back” button is your friend. Also, you can’t actually do anything in the backend that you couldn’t do otherwise. It just looks different.

When editing your profile page, you also for some reason can’t see your avatar. And the “view profile” link at the very top of the page is broken, when editing your profile. Again, these are things that I will at some point try to find a solution to.

Meanwhile, if you encounter any other oddities, let me know.

Once again, I’m really sorry for the downtime. Let’s hope that the work I carried out this past week means that things will run smoothly for a long time to come.